This Terrible Love, a journal of nonduality

  After the retreat, people invariably write that they bonded more deeply with some of the other guests than they ever have with anyone in their life. I want to write back that's because at a silent retreat you don't have to listen to anyone's ideas and complaints, but I actually get it. It’s usually only lovers…or stoners…who can sit with others quietly for hours on end. And even in silence, maybe especially in silence, you can feel as if you are as deeply engaged with another appearance of a human dreamling as in the most intimate all night conversation. Shortly before the retreat ended, Fiona asked me if I will miss everyone (as we were allowed to speak, as long as we did it away from the guests, so that verbalizing a word seemed like a forbidden act). The question made me smile, then I noticed tears. I never know why I cry or smile, the thoughts that come up to explain my reactions are never true, only an attempt by a brain that can’t even see outside of itself to ma

    At the edge of the universe love found a song and light moved slower than its speed so it could stop to see the beauty of the space between stars. Too many questions tug at the heart that might not even be hers (of course, nothing is hers, not even her), and the character is torn between giving them a beautiful answer that is a lie or an answer empty of hope that is no less a lie. In the morning I will walk into the lake to meet the sea monster, disappearing forever beneath the surface, but no, that was a nighttime dream, vivid as it seemed. I disappeared long ago. And in my cabin the girl sits pale in the chair across from me and asks, after I closed my eyes remembering the dream of the sea monster, "Where were you just now?” A question impossible to answer, so I say something like, “I was just spacing out,” and where that odd expression came from is unknown. I used to have a world, but it was like the glass globe that fell off the desk of Miss Winters in second or thir

There is no way to give this to anyone, share this shift, or awaken someone. And no, it's not going to be found if you only have a pure heart or absolute intention, for they are not even real ways of being, just ideas. This is mystery, and why and how or even what it is we truly cannot say or know. Why we seem to share this perception is unknown. We can put it in the most beautiful words, but from the perspective of those living the illusion of the separate self, it seems we have vanished from their world. From here, all that appears is a world of phantoms and ghosts dancing a dance impossibly perfect and beautiful, filled with joy and sorrow and every manner of human experience. Yet most cannot see the perfection and the beauty, they move not knowing they are intricately bound to each other, are each other, are us, even as we are no longer what they imagine a person to be. We are indeed such stuff as dreams are made of, and we are not even any thing at all. When I try to imag